The editor asked me to write something about how Blackfriars came into being. It was over thirty-three years ago and I am now six thousand miles away. So at this distance in time and place my task has its difficulties. I have little more than my memory to rely upon, and I feel like old Kaspar in Southey’s poem sitting in the sun indulging in reminiscences, perhaps as remote to many people as the Battle of Blenheim must have seemed to little Wilhelmine and her brother Peterkin.

It was Father Bede Jarrett who decided to start the review and it must have been among the many schemes that filled his thoughts when he became Provincial at the end of the year 1916. The idea of such a review was by no means new. The Hawkesyard Review, which had been in existence for about twenty years, was an occasional review edited by the students at Hawkesyard and a kind of depository for their written efforts, literary, philosophical and theological. It began as a collection of manuscripts later it appeared in typescript and finally blossomed out in the full glory of print three times a year. During Father Vincent McNabb’s priorship the students were actually printing it themselves on a hand press, and printing it well enough to win the praise of experts. The Review provided a training ground for aspiring writers whose contributions naturally varied in style and quality: it was just a family affair and strictly for private circulation only. There was another collection of manuscripts of a different kind, produced annually by the Hawkesyard students, called The Mince Pie.

The contrast between Savonarola and his times was not as vivid as had been imagined. Much of what he stood for was but the logical corollary to many of the aspirations of Renaissance men, a fact which explains in more than one way the success he enjoyed in the Florence of the Medici. Such a success in that town is even more remarkable when one realises that Savonarola was not a Florentine by birth. This must be pointed out, since the inhabitants of Florence looked down upon the other Italians as inferior beings, who behaved boorishly and spoke in absurdly ridiculous dialects. He came instead from Ferrara in north Italy. Now during the fifteenth century Ferrara was in more than one way the capital of the north Italian Renaissance. Yet Savonarola’s home atmosphere was by no means that of Cossa’s dazzling frescoes in the Schifanoia palace. What instead dominated it was the rigid puritanism of his grandfather, the court physician Michele Savonarola, a narrow scholar still intellectually in the middle ages. Michele saw to his grandson’s upbringing, and from him the young Savonarola acquired a remarkable taste for Holy Scripture. Still the attraction of Petrarch’s love lyric did not by-pass him altogether.

Of the impact of Western science and technology on the East little needs to be said. But there is a reverse process which is less manifest, more subtle, but which may perhaps prove hardly less effective in shaping the future of mankind. ‘Let us look towards the East’, the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung has bidden us. ‘Let us look towards the East. . . . European cannons have burst open the gates of Asia; European science and technique, European worldly-mindedness and cupidity. . . . We have conquered the East politically. . . . But do you know what happened when Rome overthrew the Near East politically? The Spirit of the East entered Rome . . . and out of the most unlikely corners of Asia Minor came a new, spiritual Rome. Would it be unthinkable that the same thing might happen today? ... I know that our [Western] unconscious is full of Eastern symbolism. ... The spirit of the East penetrates through all our pores, and reaches the most vulnerable places of Europe.’

Perhaps that sounds extravagant. But I am not so sure. It was just about the time when the French revolutionaries were enthroning the goddess of Reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame that some Upanishads were first translated into a European language. It was a rather dubious translation into French by way of the Persian, and, for some time after that, European renderings of the great spiritual classics of the East were rare enough. But we know how the discovery of Buddhist thought influenced Schopenhauer; and however much he may have misinterpreted it, European thinkers have never since been unaware of the challenge to their own ways of thinking of an immense power of age-old wisdom in the Far East.

The posthumously published Un mauvais Rêve, recently translated into English, adds a third murderess to those with whom we have already become acquainted in the novels of Bernanos published in his lifetime. Certain basic features are common to them all. The words of Abbé Donissan to Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan would seem to apply to all three: ‘Vous êtes comme un jouet, vous êtes comme la petite balle d’un enfant, entre les mains de Satan’. They are all victims of demoniacal possession. They are therefore victims in a deeper sense than are the unfortunate persons whom they murder, more or less gratuitously. The murder they commit is but the exterior manifestation of the deep corruption within, a corruption which in each case has its origin in childhood, indeed farther back still, in the blood which they have inherited. ‘Vous n’êtes point devant Dieu coupable de ce meurtre’, says Abbé Donissan to Mouchette, and with the terrible insight that he has acquired in his grim encounter of the preceding night he reveals her vicious antecedents. The ‘communion of sinners’ of which the curé of Ambricourt wrote in his diary is strong and has deep and wide ramifications. When the sham priest of Mégère, Evangéline, is awaiting the train that will presumably decapitate her, the author adds his thoughts to hers and evokes the sin of her mother, in whose false position as a defrocked nun with an illegitimate child and in whose sacerdotal obsession her own aberration had its origin.

Can the traveller abroad penetrate the ethos of a country? If there is such a thing, the traveller, properly so-called, may do so. But is the modern tourist properly to be called a traveller? Both elements in our preliminary question are so doubtful that it is difficult to see whether what we want to say is worth the attempt. But at least, when abroad, we are conscious of difference, whether it is superficial or deep we are less able to gauge. The danger is of supposing it, on the one hand, to be all a matter of climate and food-supply, and, on the other, of carrying it so deep as to forget our common humanity. As to the tourist, we can admit him as a traveller on this simple point of difference: if he seeks difference as a titillation, for the sake of a change, to forget for a fortnight the monotony of his office and the anxieties of his personal life, he is, what he is perfectly entitled to be, a man on his holiday; but if he is prepared to study his subject beforehand, to bring philosophic principles to bear on the differences, he observes in the new environment, to reflect on them afterwards, to beware of false generalisations and biassed conclusions, he is a serious traveller, if only for a fortnight, even though merely a tourist.